The American Civil War

 

Below are some of the causes of the American Civil War (reference: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/FreeDownload/Early-American-History-text-100887) . Please read the following before advancing to the URLS. 

 

The Compromise of 1850

The discovery of gold in California in 1849 and the rapid growth in the population in that territory created a political crisis in American life. Under the Missouri Compromise of 1820, an agreement had been reached between the slave-holding states of the South and the non-slave states of the North. The agreement was that the number of “slave” and “non-slave” states in the Union would remain equal, thus insuring the Southern states control of the Senate of the United States Congress. The Congress is the law-making body of the United States government, and has two parts. The House of Representatives directly represents population, with each state having a proportional numbers of Representatives based on it population. But in the Senate, each state has two members, regardless of population, and all proposed legislation had to pass the Senate before it could become law. The Northern states, with their larger population, would always dominate the House of Representatives, but if all the Southern members of the Senate would vote together on slavery issues, no law that seriously limited slavery could ever be passed.

The agreement reached in the Missouri Compromise had been followed for 30 years, but now the agreement was in trouble. The territory of California want to enter the Union as a free state, but there was no suitable territory ready to enter the Union as a “slave” state to maintain the balance between the two sections.

The debate over the admission of California was long and furious. Southerners talked opening of leaving the Union, while Northern politicians talked openly of forcing them to remain. It took the greatest efforts of the leaders of both the House of Representatives and the Senate to reach a compromise and prevent Civil War in 1850.

If the Southern states were going agree to put themselves in the position of a permanent minority, the price was not going to be cheap. The Compromise of 1850 was the political agreement that had allowed California to enter the Union as a free state, but there were many other parts to the agreement. Included in the Compromise was the agreement that the territories of Utah and New Mexico (which also included the area that is now the state of Arizona) were to be organized on the basis of “popular sovereignty”, and to decide the issue of slavery for themselves. Popular Sovereignty was the belief the local residents of a territory should determine by popular vote such important issues as the future of slavery in their territory. Another agreement was that the slave trade, very offensive to Northerners living in the nation’s capital, was to be banned in Washington D.C. The Slave trade was the buy and selling of slaves, or bringing in slaves to be bought or sold. Another agreement under the Compromise was that a boundary adjustment was to be made between the state of Texas and the territory of New Mexico, with Texas to be paid for the lost territory. (The Hispanic citizens of New Mexico did not want to be included in the state of Texas.) Also favoring the state of Texas was that the United States was to assume the debts of the old Republic of Texas; and the Southern states were given a vague promise of a federally funded railroad from New Orleans, through Texas and the New Mexico territory to California. (The Gadsden Purchase in 1854 was a part of this agreement.) Finally, there would be a new and strict Fugitive Slave Law that allowed southerners to reclaim slaves that had escaped to the northern states.

Volunteer military units became increasingly popular throughout the South.

 

Fugitive Slaves and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

It was the Fugitive Slave Law the first provoked the outrage of Northerners. Under the provisions of the law, local sheriffs and other officials were required to assist in the capture and return of any escaped slaves. When Southern bounty hunters swarmed into Northern cities and towns soon after the passage of the law, they began grabbing any dark-skinned person they could find, claim that they were escaped slaves, and demanded the assistance of local officials in aiding the “return” of the captives to slavery in the South. Some of the captives had lived as free people in the North for generations. Not just the Abolitionists, but most Northerners were outraged. Participation in the “Underground Railroad”, the secret (and now illegal) movement of escaped slaves to freedom in Canada, soared in the North.

This growing anti‑slavery movement was reinforced in 1852 with the publication of

21. Tom’s Cabin, a novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe was the daughter of a prominent Abolitionist Minister and had married into one of the most prestigious families in Massachusetts, Tom’s Cabin was her melodramatic novel of slave life in the South that quickly became a best seller. The novel sold over 300,000 copies within the first year of publication, and the subsequent play was presented to packed houses all over the North. The story centered around the life of a respected older slave ( Tom), and his life under three different owners. In the story, Tom’s first two owners were kind, but the third, the evil Simon Legree, was cruel, and had had Tom beaten. Harriet Stowe had tried to remain neutral in the North-South controversy by having the two kind owners as Southerners and the evil Legree as a Northerner who had moved to the South, but this distinction was lost on the increasingly anti-slavery audiences in the North and the defensive slave owners in the South.

The slavery controversy turned bloody with the proposal of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Senator Stephan Douglas of Illinois had been one of the most important backers of the Compromise of 1850, but he also was ambitious to gain support for a transcontinental railroad to run from Chicago to San Francisco. The Southern states had already been promised such a railroad in the Compromise of 1850, so in order to gain Southern votes in the Senate for his proposed Northern route, Douglas would have to make some major concessions.

Following the example of the laws passed for the Utah and New Mexico territories, Douglas proposed that the Kansas and Nebraska territories, much closer to statehood that Utah or New Mexico, also be allowed to use the doctrine of “popular sovereignty” to decide the issue of slavery for themselves. With Southern support, the plan was passed into law as the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The Kansas-Nebraska Act allowed for a popular vote in each territory to determine the future of slavery while organizing Territorial governments in each territory.

 

“Bleeding Kansas”

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed for a popular vote by the settlers to a territory to decide the issue for slavery in the territory before it became a state. In the case of the Kansas territory, pro-slavery settlers (called “jayhawkers”) from neighboring Missouri swarmed into Kansas to add their votes to decision on slavery. Abolitionists in the North called for volunteers to move to Kansas to help defend the territory from the evils of slavery. An attack on the town of Lawrence, Kansas by pro‑slavery forces was countered by the "Pottawatomie Massacre" lead by a fanatical Abolitionist named John Brown. “Bleeding Kansas” was the name given to the new territory by sensationalist newspaper accounts.

The election of 1856 saw the beginnings of a new political party in the United States. The Republican Party made no pretense of being a national party, but campaigned on the single issue of "no extension of slavery" into the territories. The new party nominated the popular Mexican War hero John C. Fremont as it presidential candidate, but lost the election to the Democrat James Buchanan of Pennsylvania.

 

The Dred Scott Case

The next crisis over slavery was created by the Supreme Court. Dred Scott had been a slave for an Army doctor. When the doctor died, Scott claimed that living out of a slave state had made him and his family free. In the Dred Scott Decision, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney said that because Dred Scott was a slave, he had no right to take his case to court in the first place. Furthermore, because slaves were property, neither the states nor the federal government could forbid people from owning slaves anywhere in the United States. For all practical purposes, the highest court in the United States had declared that all laws against slavery were now nullified. More and more Northerners came to the idea that the only resolution of the slavery issue was the complete abolition of slavery throughout the United States, regardless of the feelings of Southerners.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates in Illinois in 1858 kept the slavery issue alive. Stephan Douglas was the Senator from Illinois who had sponsored the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the idea of popular sovereignty for the territories. Abraham Lincoln was a young lawyer from the state capital of Springfield who supported the Republican position that there should be no extension of slavery to any territories in the United States. Although Douglas won re‑election to the Senate, (Remember that the state legislatures elected U.S. Senators at this time.) Lincoln's skill in debating the famous politician brought him national attention.

The next incident to inflame the nation took place a year later at the federal armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. John Brown, the abolitionist from Kansas, captured the armory with a small group a followers with the idea of encouraging a slave rebellion in Virginia and the neighboring states. The leader of the military force that captured the fanatical abolitionist was Robert E. Lee, later to command the Confederate armies against the United States. John Brown was captured and hanged, to become a martyr to the anti-slavery forces in the North.

 

The Election of 1860

The Presidential election of 1860 saw the total fragmentation of the older political parties in the United States. The new Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln of Illinois as its candidate, while the Democratic party split along sectional lines. The northern Democrats nominated Stephan Douglas of Illinois, and the southern Democrats nominated Stephen Breckinridge of Kentucky. A fourth party, the Constitutional Union Party, was formed with the sole issue of preserving the Union. The election results showed the deep divisions in the nation. Lincoln swept all of the non-slave Northern States, Breckinridge, the Southern Democrat, swept all of the slave-holding states of the Deep South. Stephen Douglas, the Northern Democrat, won only in the states of New Jersey and Missouri. Bell, the Constitutional Union candidate, had won in the three slave states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia in the Upper South. In the election itself, Lincoln received the most popular votes of any of the four candidates, but not a majority. He did, however, receive a majority of the electoral vote, and therefore was elected President.

South Carolina was the first state to carry out its threat of secession, but it was soon followed by five more states in the south. These states meant in Montgomery, Alabama in February of 1861 to form the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, a former Senator and Secretary of War, was elected as President.

The Confederate States quickly organized their new government and started to gain control of all federal property in the South. One military post that resisted was Fort Sumner in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. When Lincoln sent ships to resupply the fort, Confederate forces bombarded the fort and forced its garrison to surrender.

After the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to put down the rebellion. This action caused four more southern states to join the new Confederate States of America.

Lincoln first offered command of the Union armies to Robert E. Lee, the officer who had captured John Brown. But when Virginia seceded, Lee felt that he had to defend his native state. Lincoln then appointed Irvin McDowell to command the Army of the Potomac, the Union Army established to defend the nation's capital.

In July of 1861, McDowell crossed the Potomac to attack the Confederate forces organizing in Virginia. The Union Army was defeated and thrown into a panic at the Battle of Bull Run. The North's hope for a quick and easy victory vanished with the defeat.

Lets learn about slavery within the American Civil War through online URLS: 

- https://www.nps.gov/fosu/learn/historyculture/upload/SLAVERY-BROCHURE.pdf

-http://www.sparknotes.com/biography/lincoln/section8.rhtml